Background: The proper management of emergency evacuations in large, complex public occupancy buildings is crucial to their success, and therefore critical to the life safety of occupants. Especially with the recent increase in security and terrorism evacuation incidents (for example in 2016 a suspicious canister was found at London City Airport, and a suspected bomb discovered at the Emirates Stadium), ensuring the efficacious planning of these procedures is of paramount importance – and the first step towards this is determining the procedures that are currently employed. Large, complex public occupancy buildings such as stadia and airport terminals are comprised of many operational entities, which although may have strictly defined roles during day-to-day operations, may not be aware of their responsibilities during evacuation events. For example, should members of staff in concession outlets assist in directing evacuees during such an event, or leave the building as well? This information is crucial in assessing the planning of evacuation procedures, but is hard to obtain without speaking to and analysing information from industry practitioners directly involved in the planning of these procedures.

Objectives: The aim of this research is to use a systems engineering approach to obtain a better understanding of emergency evacuation events in airports and stadia. The scope of the proposed project will encompass the investigation of the responsibilities of the different entities within airport terminal buildings and stadia during evacuation events, and the communications (and methods of such communication) that occur between them. The research will use SysML as a modelling tool to achieve this aim.

Potential industry impact: The potential application to airport emergency management is large, and this is an area of significant interest due to increased security concerns at airports worldwide, in the wake of recent marauding terrorist firearms attacks and bombing incidents. Furthermore, through collaboration with the only worldwide body of its type looking at safety at sports stadiums, the Sports Ground Safety Authority, the potential impact on safety at sports stadia worldwide is large.

Update: This research project was completed over the course of three months during summer 2018, before presentation of results at the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation Industry Showcase Event in September 2018. To achieve the research aims, one mid-size North American airport and two large sports stadiums in the UK were chosen as case study sites. Visits were made to each of these sites to observe them during operational periods (i.e. the stadiums on match days), before interviews with the heads of safety and security were conducted following the visits. Together with analysis of regulatory and planning documents, enough data was gathered with which modelling of the emergency evacuation management systems at each of these sites could be undertaken using SysML. Furthermore, through the recruitment of two UROP students we were able to further use SysML to map emergency and evacuation response plans in a small general aviation airport and medium sized stadium in North America. Structural diagrams were used to model both human and technological resources, and responsibilities of each job role, and behaviour diagrams were used to further detail the responsibilities of staff, and their interaction with technological emergency response systems.

Collaborations with the case study sites are still ongoing, and over the next few months they will be further contacted in order to validate the SysML diagrams produced during the project. The next step with this project is to account for the regulatory systems governing evacuation procedures in these buildings, which will be incorporated into the existing SysML diagrams using requirements diagrams. Collaboration with the Sports Ground Safety Authority is still on going, and we are looking to use results from this project to affect change on regulatory practices in sports stadiums in the UK. Finally, we are looking into publicising the results of this project at an international academic conference in 2019.